Of Bicycles, Biographies and Bits

I came, I saw, I oriented. Today was the first day of school as I formally start my PhD program. The UCLA Information Studies program looks like a good place. They're kind of a crazy department in that the students and faculty are all over the place in their research and they come very diverse academic backgrounds. I think I'll fit right in. As a field, Information Studies remains loosely defined even though the first schools of information opened up towards the end of the 19 Century. Back then the main focus of these schools was the training of librarians. However, even then the scholars of the field sought to develop a theoretical framework in which to embed the discipline of librarianship. The idea was to have a consistent conceptual theory which would both make predictions about the behavior of people and institutions as they consume, create and organize information. A theory of information should both reveal the path that took us to our current place in time and illuminate the way forward. Unfortunately, we've yet to develop a Grand Unified Theory of Information and are rapidly coming to the conclusion that there may be none. So we end up borrowing insights from Economics, Computer Science, Sociology, System Theory, Cybernetics and, in my own research program, Psychology. Oh, there also a lot of Philosophy mixed in as well. Suddenly I'm regretting skipping that squishy stuff back in my undergrad years. I was just too manly for all that. Instead I focused on Science and Math and technology. I'm not going to dignify technology with a capital letter. I'm much too jaded after a career spent in the trenches of Information Technology. That's kind of what I want to write about tonight. ( Read more... )